13 Most Beautiful... Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests December 31, 2008

Singer/guitarist/composer Dean Wareham (formerly of Galaxie 500 and Luna) was commissioned by The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to compose music to accompany some of Warhol’s rarely seen silent-film portraits, which the artist called Screen Tests. These extraordinary documents of the 1960s New York art scene constitute a voluminous portrait gallery of well-known celebrities, Factory superstars and anonymous teenagers. The Screen Tests— four-minute black-and-white silent film portraits from the 1960s—were used, as were other Warhol films, as part of the light show for Warhol’s 1966 multimedia happening, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which showcased the radical art rock of the Velvet Underground.

Wareham’s pensive tenor and dreamy songs and Britta Phillips’ wistful harmonies make the perfect live soundtrack for Warhol’s simple yet transfixing films. The husband and wife team (who also scored the acclaimed feature film The Squid and the Whale) probe the subtle nuances of mood reflected in the Screen Tests’ portraits, including Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper, and Edie Sedgewick, lyrically and musically illuminating the shadowed psyches of the candidates for Factory Superstardom who willingly submitted to Warhol’s cool cinematic gaze.

13 Most Beautiful... Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests is a project jointly commissioned by the Andy Warhol Museum and Pittsburgh Cultural Trust for the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts 2008.

Official Website: http://www.pushfestival.ca